Well, it was a cold and miserable weekend, not least because I was suffering with a terrible bad back. It’s not so much the pain that was getting me down but the fact I couldn’t easily do all the things I wanted to! Saturday was actually a beautiful crisp, sunny day but involved a 5.30am start to get all the dogs up and sorted before we left for Rotherham, I also had 3 cocker pups to take with us that were leaving for their new homes but we had the van packed and left for 7am (a little later than planned) and headed off for the scenic journey over Woodhead pass. We made good time which was lucky because they started racing 5 mins early and we were second race in Division One with the Speed Demonz, the only team we had entered. We were 6th seed out of 7 teams on a seed time of 17.90, top seed being the Live Wires on 16.96, nearly a second faster, we expected a drubbing! I had been a little undecided who to run in the absence of Dottie or Lexie (both in whelp) so we ended up with 6 dogs named…Dylan, Bailey, Teal, Faith, Ethan, Mac. The first 3 were our set line up and we’d try each of the other 3 and see how we got on. We started with Mac but I soon put him away, he just doesn’t run all that well over 8” and Ethan and Faith seemed to be running better. Of course, they both have the ‘turning the wrong way in the opposite lane’ syndrome but fortunately in different lanes so I just alternated them in and out with each other depending on what lane we were in. Dylan was back on top ‘pre-injury’ form running consistent low 4 seconds and everyone else seemed pretty fired up too. We did better than expected and beat both Dolphins and Cheshire Set but stupidly lost against Moltens (yep…you guessed it…lights!), this put us 5th so we exceeded expectation but we also ran a new seasons best…in the last leg of the last race of our last tournament for the year! 17.71 which consisted of a perfect rolling start, 4.12 from both Dylan and Bailey, 4.57 from Faith and 4.90 from Teal. Ethan was also running 4.5’s which is pretty damn good for him, maybe we’re finally starting to see his potential coming through. This gives us a nice base to start working on over winter, we know Fi can run 4.2’s over 8” so she definitely has more to give, I’m sure Dyl and Bai will shave a little more time off as they get used to running the lower height too and Teal…who knows…we can but try! I am toying with the idea of trying out a flat fronted box over winter to see if that brings any benefits. I’m conscious of not wanting to fix what ‘aint broke since most of our dogs have a decent box technique but I am told that a good box turn on a boomerang should hold up on a flat fronted box too, we’ll see.
The cocker babies all left with no problems…Tally (Bryning Totally Trouble) has gone to Ellen from Cambridgeshire Canines
and Charlie (Bryning Brock) has gone to Hannah from Ready2Fly
...so hopefully we’ll see both out on the flyball circuit next year. Bracken (Bryning Bracken) has gone up to Co. Durham. It’s very quiet at home now with just Ziva and Tarka and will be more so next weekend when Ziva leaves us to go to her new home in Northern Ireland.
We also saw Jude (Bryning Crazy Talk) from Ethan and Dottie's litter and what a handsome boy he's turned into...
2 comments:
Good luck with you playing over winter.
Well done for your time. Shame to end when you know they've got so much to give, but always good to end on a high!
I still cant get over Jude, lol
Go upright ;-), we did at the start of the year and haven't looked back. We found they don't 'stick' on the box as much although we did do quite a bit of retraining aswell x
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